HER NUMBER.

Mom’s email had slammed around inside my head the entire night, and that was just the subject line. True to the coward I was, I hadn’t even opened the email to read it. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it either. What was I supposed to do with her number? Yes, call her; that was the obvious answer. But what was I supposed to say that would make her want to speak to me, to keep speaking to me? My mind wandered to various scenarios while I reread page two hundred fifty-nine in my book for the twentieth time.

But a half-naked Sam plopped down on the couch. A freshly showered woodsy smell wafted around me.

He tucked a damp strand of blond hair behind his ear and reached for the remote on the coffee table. “All right if I watch TV?”

Despite my usual urge to turn feral and hiss at whoever dared disrupt my reading, I found myself nodding. It was his house; he shouldn’t even have to ask.

He sat so close, the left leg of his jeans grazed my bare toes. I swallowed at the feel of the fabric, at the specks of water still dotting the ridged muscle of his tanned skin, at the stunning pair of blue eyes pinned to mine.

Just as I was about to settle my feet on the floor, away from his jeans and his warmth, he flipped the channel to a zombie television show. A particularly brutal de-braining made me pause.

“This looks...appetizing,” I said, touching my hand to my stomach.

“You’re a fan?”

“Of spilled brain juices? Not usually, no.”

“You have to give it a chance. It’s not all blood and guts,” Sam said and stretched his arms along the back of the couch. “It’s an all-day-long marathon, so I’m not moving from this couch.”

And apparently he expected me to drop everything and do the same. Unlike slutty Paige who had been spellbound by him at the library yesterday, I wouldn’t do his bidding. I snapped my book shut on my bookmark, but he grabbed my ankle before I could move off the couch.

“Stay. Please,” he said, rocking his left leg so it covered more of my toes. His imploring stare instantly defused me because there was something so haunted in his eyes, something I couldn’t place. “At least for one episode.”

“Fine,” I said and settled back into the couch. “One episode.”

His mouth slid into an easy smile that powered warmth to my cheeks. His gaze dipped to my lips for a split second.

I looked away and fanned the pages of my book to create some air flow. Had the air conditioner stopped working?

I searched for some kind of hangover in his face but saw no trace of one. It made me wonder how many sides of Sam there were because this was not the sexually aggressive stranger in the library, not the pissed-off version who glared at his older brother, and not the drunk who’d slammed around the kitchen on a quest for bacon. He was just a half-naked zombie show fan with a black eye who needed some company and whose jeans heated my cold feet. I liked this version much better.

He pointed at the book in my hands. “What are you reading there?”

“Heist My Heart.” I handed it to him, waiting to be ridiculed for my genre preference like Riley had, but he flipped it over to read the blurb without even a smirk at the almost nude couple embracing on the cover. His pale blond eyelashes caught the glow of sunlight behind him from the window while his eyes tracked over the book.

“I thought you were reading Have Your Way With Me.”

My face heated at how his mouth moved over those particular words, at the memory of his book retrieval skills in the library. Holy hell.

“Uh, yeah,” I said and cleared my throat. “It’s next in the series. I have about forty more pages to go in this one.”

He glanced at me, a frown creasing his forehead. “So you didn’t bring Have Your Way With Me with you to D.C.?”

Somehow the words in his question scrambled themselves into just Me With You before they flowed normally again, and that phrase kicked up my heartbeat. “I did, but I accidentally left it at the airport, and therefore had a book emergency.”

“Is it good?” he asked. His long fingers turned to the first page.

“So far.” He wasn’t handing it back. He was reading ‘book porn,’ and my eyes widened as he thumbed to the next page. “See, Amber Dexter was taken hostage during a bank heist, but Detective Bailey thinks there’s something fishy about her and that she might be in on it.”

“Hey.” He flashed out a hand, and his fingertip brushed my lips. “Shh.”

I jerked back, not from his touch alone, but from the electrical pulse it ignited throughout my entire body.

“Spoilers,” he said, his voice soft, his gaze locked on my mouth again. He took back his hand and returned to the book, a small smile playing across his lips.

“Sorry,” I whispered and shifted my attention to the television and away from him and his shock-inducing fingers.

But they had made it even harder to breathe than the naked torso within touching distance. It took until the end of a commercial break for my pulse to slow to somewhere near normal, and then I finally relaxed enough to focus on the show.

Sam glued himself to the pages of my book until the next commercial break when I caught him looking at me. “Why do you do that?” he asked.

I blinked. “Do what?”

“Your hair.” He tipped his chin at my hand.

I glanced down at the swatch of hair curled between my fingers and immediately released it. It was a habit I’d picked up during childhood to rub the ends of a piece of hair over my lips during an intense book, or in this case television show. When I still lived in D.C., my female best friend, Ashely, used to say I secretly wanted a mustache. Maybe I did, but I was so horrified by the idea, that I drew one on her with permanent marker while she slept. She didn’t speak to me for a week, and because I felt guilty about it, I drew one on myself and we performed a Queen concert at recess as Freddie Mercury look-alikes. Good times.

“Habit,” I said with a shrug. I hoped this wouldn’t end with another Freddie impersonation because talk of mustaches would lead to me staring at the stubble surrounding Sam’s full lips. The lips that were now moving, and I hadn’t heard a word they’d said. “Huh?”

Sam leaned toward me and rested a hand on my bent knee. “I said...did you know your lips are one of the most sensitive body parts you have?”

I stared at his hand while a penetrating thrill radiated out from it. “Really?”

“You rub your hair over your lips because you like the feel, don’t you.”

If the point of this conversation was to melt my insides with thoughts of all the other things I could attach my lips to, it was working 100 percent.

“Yes,” I said, breathless, and flicked my tongue over them self-consciously.

His gaze followed the movement, and the muscles in his shoulders rippled with every heave of his chest. He stood quickly and faced the television as he cracked the knuckles of his unbandaged hand against his hip. “Pizza sound good?”

“Umm...” I sat up, shaking my head, unable to switch gears as fast as he had. “Sure. Pizza sounds fine.”

He bent to lay the paperback open and face down on the coffee table, and I threw my hands out to stop him while a pained cry choked its way out of my throat. Hurting a book’s spine was one of my worst nightmares come true. He paused to look at me with an evil spark in his eyes, then with a slow smile curling his mouth, he brought his fingers to the corner of the page where he’d stopped reading.

“Gah! No!” I shot forward and wound my hands around his before he could bend it inward. “Back away from the book or you’re going to make me hemorrhage.”

He laughed, and the warm, rumbling sound brightened the room as much as the afternoon sun. “I’m just messing with you. See? I didn’t even lose your spot in the book.”

He was right. My bookmark was safely tucked away at where I’d stopped reading, but at that moment, my focus centered on every part of our hands that touched. Shockwaves exploded until I took the book away from him, my finger bookmarking his spot. My skin sizzling hot, I looked around for something else to mark his place.

Sam handed me a phone bill. “That’s what bills are for, right?”

“That’s the only thing they’re good for,” I said and settled the bill into his spot in the book with a smile. Hemorrhage thwarted.

“So,” Sam said and cleared his throat. “Do you like pizza with your bacon?”

“I’m guessing I don’t have a choice.” This boy and his bacon.

“No, not really,” he said with a twinkle in his eyes. “I’ll call. You keep watching.” He thundered up the stairs, I guessed in search of his phone.

I tried to focus on the ending of the show, but thoughts of Sam’s attention on my lips made it difficult to concentrate. Was he as attentive to the other parts of my body, too? Signs pointed to yes, especially yesterday at the library and last night when my nipples had poked through my wine-soaked T-shirt. He had to have noticed them aiming right at him like a double-breasted shotgun. Kind of hard not to notice. So did he think about my body parts often? Did he wonder what they would feel like pressed against his?

Liquid heat puddled to my center. Squirming, I drew in a ragged breath and forced the thoughts away. A dirty kind of shame settled into my gut because I couldn’t think about him that way. Before he grew into a hot, half-naked man, he was like a little brother who’d draw pictures of mustached men, hold them in front of his face, and say, “Does this make you happy?” in a high-pitched voice. It invariably sent me into hysterical giggles. Geez, what was with my childhood and mustaches? Somehow it must’ve paved the way for my panties to dissolve around men who sported stubble. Or at least a certain man.

And he was three years younger than me, and chances were he hadn’t quite matured past boy-in-a-candy-store mentality that seemed typical for his age. Plus, why would he want to when he looked like that? He could have anyone, anywhere, anytime. So what was he doing wasting his Sunday afternoon with a slightly neurotic librarian who may or may not have a fetish with facial hair and couldn’t make a simple phone call to Her Number?

Sam’s footsteps rumbled down the stairs, and to my despair, he’d put on a white T-shirt.

I tried to empty my expression of all disappointment while I pointed at the new addition to his ensemble. “Were you cold?”

“Hot, actually.”

Understatement of the decade.

He gave a secret smile, one I had no idea how to read, and gestured in the direction of the front door. “I didn’t want to scare off the delivery guy.”

“Or delivery girl. Equal opportunity, right?” I said, remembering our conversation from last night.

“Yeah.” He sat next to me, closer this time, so close the back of his thigh crushed my feet, but I hardly noticed. The ends of his hair, now dry, fell across his jaw. His gaze locked on mine, he pushed the silky strands that lay against his full mouth off his face, much like mine had earlier. But that move could never look as sexy on me as it did on him.

“Hey, any word from Riley?” I asked to alter my focus on anything but Sam. I hadn’t seen Riley since I arrived yesterday.

Sam’s lips parted as if he was going to say something, then he seemed to change his mind. “I’m not my brother’s keeper.”

“Okay.” Once again, I wondered what had changed between them. When we were younger, they acted like brothers, teasing and annoying each other, but they never acted hatefully toward one another. I picked Heist My Heart up from the coffee table and set it on his knee, hoping he would pick it up again just so I could watch him read because I was so easily entertained. “Riley called that book porn, by the way.”

Sam’s mouth slid into a salacious smile that curled my toes. “Book porn?”

“That’s what he called it,” I said, nodding.

He rolled his eyes, the smile vanishing. “Riley can shove it up his ass.”

“No. No, he can’t. No books up anyone’s asses. Ever.” I placed my palm over the book’s cover, my fingers brushing his thigh. “Especially that one because you and I are both reading it.”

He took the book and my hand in his and held me there while he leaned toward me, closer and closer until his mouth was just a breath away. “Deal,” he said, and the word sighed over my face like a divine whisper.

Images of other possible deals we could make tumbled through my head, but the ones involving naked flesh and lips and no-strings sex burned the hottest and rose up above the rest.

“Sam...” I said, and there was a hint of a question mark in my tone, as if my desire dared me to ask what perched on my tongue: Will you fuck my brains out?

“Yes,” he said in a husky voice.

Was he answering my unspoken question? If he could read my mind, he’d know I was a naughty librarian with an ache between my legs ready and willing for him to ease it. Just once, then I’d go back to my vibrator Slave. Just once, then I’d forget all about the niggles in the back of my head that reminded me he wasn’t even old enough to legally drink.

The doorbell rang, and the sexual spell broke.

“Pizza,” I announced, because apparently I liked to state the obvious when I was turned on enough to implode.

He dug in his back pocket, his gaze glued to the wooden flooring on the way to the front door.

Good God, what just happened? Had almost happened? I swept the hair off my heated neck so I could cool myself enough to think. I was in D.C. for one reason and one reason only—my dream library internship. The letter detailing my duties didn’t mention fornicating with my childhood friend’s younger brother. Pretty sure I’d remember if it had. I couldn’t allow him to ruin my focus of turning this internship into my dream job. I couldn’t allow him to seduce me to sleep with him, because despite what my hormones said, I was more than some random conquest. Unlike him, I respected myself too much to sleep around. I had Slave, which was more than enough to get me off every time. And who knows? Maybe Sam sucked in bed.

But holy hell, I sure doubted it.

We ate in silence during the next zombie episode, the awkwardness between us like a thick rope pulled tight. But the tension gradually eased when the smell of gooey cheese faded and Sam picked up my book again. He read while I watched body fluids squirt from orifices they had no business squirting from. I kept my feet on the floor, away from his toe-warming jeans, but I stole glances at him every once in a while just to see him turning the pages. Watching him read was almost as hot as the power of his gaze.

While the credits rolled on the second episode, I caught him looking at me, too, and not just at me, but through me, as if he could sense everything I kept hidden.

“I’m not sorry for stalking you at the library yesterday,” he blurted.

“Really?” I narrowed my eyes. Some of our conversation topics caused me whiplash with the speed in which he jumped into them.

“But I should have told you who I was,” he said.

“Yeah, that would’ve been really nice before you cornered me against the bookshelf.”

A slight smile turned up those lips. “I didn’t hear a lot of complaining.”

I glanced away, shaking my head at the couch cushion instead of him because it wouldn’t judge me. That whole thing in the library had been a moment of weakness, and unless you counted entire large bags of peanut M&M’s, I didn’t have very many of those. With my dream internship beginning tomorrow, I vowed to behave myself. I needed to consider my life goals, attempt to make Mom and Dad proud for once, and Sam... Well, there just wasn’t room on the agenda for a broken heart. Because honestly, what else could a guy like him give me that I couldn’t give myself?

He closed the book on the phone bill and posted his elbows on his knees, and something in that pose conveyed that things were about to get philosophical. “I think you liked the whole stranger-danger thing, though. Or maybe it was the very public library.”

“Okay, well I wish I could say it’s been entertaining,” I said, dipping my head so my hair fell in my face. “But it’s past my bedtime.”

“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Yeah, well...yeah.” For someone who had never earned anything below a 4.0 grade point average, I was exceptionally fluent in awkward nonsense.

He looked at me with his whole face grinning, and I had to get out of there quick or he would engage me in a frank discussion about things I didn’t want to talk about. Not today. Not in my lifetime.

I pushed to my feet, ready to leave him for the safety of my bedroom, when the doorbell rang again.

“More pizza?” I asked.

Sam shook his head, that same amused glint in his expression lighting the room brighter than it already was. He should really have a warning label attached to him.

“Saved by the ding-dong,” I breathed and stepped toward the front door.

Outside, a delivery woman shoved a heavy basket of fruit wrapped in red crinkly plastic into my arms. “Sign here,” she ordered, and because I had no more arms left, I took the pen she handed me and blindly scrawled my name somewhere behind the basket.

“Have a very fruity day,” she said, and by her sarcastic tone, I wasn’t convinced I would.

“Thanks. You too,” I called after her.

After juggling the basket inside and to the kitchen, I found a card taped under a white bow.

Paige,

I heard you were back in the city.

Talk soon.

I stared out the kitchen window, seeing nothing, while the citrusy odor from the basket soured my insides. My parents had likely given him an innocent information leak. But to me, it ruined everything.

Talk soon.

No fucking way. It came across as an order, not a promise, and I had nothing to say to him anyway.

Sam sauntered around the corner and eyed the fruit. “For you?”

On my way out of the kitchen, I crumpled the card in my fist. “Just a mistake.”